Not having a gun doesn't stop this from happening.
Also, according to your logic, it would be better to ban guns because of evil people using them (at which point they would kill by another means like in the Bejing situation), and that would be worth good people not having them to defend themselves?
So in your ideal world my wife gets killed by a mountain lion? That's rather rude.
I have successfully proven that guns do save people, and have successfully proven that lack of guns does not stop mass murderers from attacking an elementary school (Bejing case).
In order to make the case that guns should be illegal, you would have to disprove at least one of those points, which is now impossible given there is historical precedent for.
@moopy Actually no. In order to make the case that guns should be illegal, I have to prove that the legality of it is more harmful than helpful. Which there is "historical precedent for" as you so eloquently wrote.
In my "ideal world" noone commits any murder. Whether with a gun or anything else. But that's not exactly probable. A decrease in murder thanks to making guns illegal however, is.
If the thousands of people who have been saved by guns would've died instead of the millions who were killed by them, that seems like a fair trade to me. Not ideal, but fair.
Gun control doesn't solve anything. Crossbow killings would just be on the rise. Gangs would take to the streets wielding these weapons, and none would be safe!
In case any English-speakers don't understand the French cartoon: The first guy says, "The law is clear. Any person who voluntarily kills another person will lose his head. So says the bureaucracy."
"Come here, my friend"... the executioner does his job. "And there it is. A good thing to do."
Another executioner pokes the first executioner on the back. "I'm sorry, but the law is clear. Any person who voluntarily..."
Yea just read about it an hour ago. I don't know if there is much to be said other than the fact that it is absolutely horrific and I feel horrible for the victims and for what these families are going through.
Not having a gun doesn't stop this from happening.
Also, according to your logic, it would be better to ban guns because of evil people using them (at which point they would kill by another means like in the Bejing situation), and that would be worth good people not having them to defend themselves?
So in your ideal world my wife gets killed by a mountain lion? That's rather rude.
I have successfully proven that guns do save people, and have successfully proven that lack of guns does not stop mass murderers from attacking an elementary school (Bejing case).
In order to make the case that guns should be illegal, you would have to disprove at least one of those points, which is now impossible given there is historical precedent for.
I don't know if your example is very good given that no one was killed that I can see in this specific knife attack.
"In 2010, nearly 20 children were killed and 50 wounded in a string of copycat incidents around central China. China has strict gun control laws, so knives are the weapon of choice in violent crimes."
Edit: In case you didn't notice (I didn't at first) that attack happened this morning, so they haven't released any extended injuries yet.
Anyway, the point wasn't on that singular attack, as much as it was on the string of violent crimes against children using slashing weapons as the link above discusses that more.
"In 2010, nearly 20 children were killed and 50 wounded in a string of copycat incidents around central China. China has strict gun control laws, so knives are the weapon of choice in violent crimes."
Yea I said in that specific attack. Now of all the children shot in these kinds of mass shootings what is the survival rate? because based on that incredibly limited sample approximately 75% of children wounded in those copycat attacks survived the knife attacks. I'm just saying without more information its not a great example.
See my edit above for more details on the lack of detailed information.
If my point was to show that regardless of having a gun at your disposal or not, that you would still attack and kill children in a school, then it was an amazing example.
Also, just because only 75% survived doesn't mean more survived. Maybe more were attacked with a knife since you don't have to stop to reload? So while a higher percentage of victims live, you also have more attacked. This is really just an attempt to move away from the original point I was making, which I have made, which is guns don't bust into elementary schools and kill children, people do that, with or without guns.
Fact is, the gun is the most deadly legal weapon there is. In my country we also have strict laws regarding any sort of weapon, including knives. Carrying a knife is downright illegal, unless it's for work, hunting or the like. And the worst we have had, have been a few hooligans (mostly already criminals) getting in bar room fights.
Strict weapon laws work. Period.
The "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" is the oldest, worst and most idiotic excuse there is. I remember an episode from the show 7th Heaven, where the good Reverend Eric Camden continued the quote with "People with guns kill people". Quite fitting I think.
Edit: If that is true, why does Chicago and Washington DC, with the most strict weapon laws in the united states, have among the highest gun assaults in the country? Because if strict weapon laws worked, period, then they wouldn't be that high, but they are...
"The 10 states that supply guns at the highest rates have, on average, 1.4 of the 10 laws designed to deter illegal trafficking in place — including laws against "straw purchasers" (people who are legally qualified to buy guns but who do so with the intent to sell the firearms illegally) and gun permit restrictions. The 10 states that supply interstate crime guns at the lowest rates have an average of 8.2 of the 10 laws."
Oh, and to counter your little Chicago/DC argument; the place with the highest crime rate in the world, is the Vatican city. And if I'm not mistaken, they pretty much have no laws regarding the possession of guns.
@Syntia13: I used to be on your side with that argument and still feel it's pretty valid. I think the other side of it is those who don't know of current or past events are doomed to repeat them. Media needs to strike up some balance, I feel, and inevitably focus on the wrong things.
I'm just sad about this whole thing. And I don't think there are any "easy" answers. Gun control, further research into understanding mentally ill people, safer schools... I don't think there is one quick, easy, simple answer.
I just hope people are shocked enough by this senselessness to treat their fellow man better.
@moopy: Owning a gun for self-defense really doesn't work quite as well as one might think. Guns are not defensive things, they don't protect lives, they just kill. Maybe that someone killed by a gun could have killed someone else with his own gun, but there are still better solutions.
I'd rather go for a good security system, or perhaps a mace you could pick up and a bullet-proof vest to wear if you hear someone breaking in at night regardless. It'd probably help things just as much, with much less odds of you killing someone by accident and having to live with it for the rest of your life.
I agree with you. I'm not American so I really don't understand why americans feel the NEED to have a weapon in their houses, to "protect" themselves. Don't you have police? Don't you have security sistems in your house? Is killing the person who attacked you the best thing to do? Of course, even if they make weapons illegal, the murders rate won't reach 0%, and of course someone will find a way to obtain a gun illegaly, but it will surely be more difficult to obtain one. And if someone insane has a violent attack, maybe he would be stopped more easily if he doesn't have a gun near him.
I don't know, I don't have a solution, horrible things like this happen in every country, but it seems that in the USA the rate is higher, is there a reason for that?
Guns are designed for killing - precisely the reason why someone who wants one shouldn't have one. I will never understand the obsession with guns, it is a complete anachronism.
I do not deny that sometimes guns do work in saving lives, that sometimes they prevent a greater evil from happening. But in nearly all cases they do so by taking another life, and almost every time there would be a better solution - it's just that guns are the most common one to do.
That said, I do not think we should just outlaw guns, because then only the outlaws have guns. Instead, we should offer alternatives, and try to affect the public opinion that guns are a necessary evil: they really aren't.
I've brought up maces, security systems, and bulletproof vests. They don't give you the sense of power and invulnerability guns do, which I guess means they'd be more difficult to rely on - but they also don't take lives. In extreme cases, if you're blessed with an exceptionally calm head, you could also just try to talk down the intruder: it works more often than you'd think.
Guns are the easy way out. I'm not the one to advocate easy ways: they're almost always morally questionable and not exactly something to tell to kids to do.
But more importantly, we should look to the reasons and motivations of doing these things, rather than the tools used - because if we just lock out the tools, they'll find other ones.
"Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.
The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."
In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy."
@Shandyr: Very good arguments. Unfortunately, I believe a big reason for C) is E): people see they're going to become famous of this, so they'll go right ahead and do it, and the media covering in such a huge manner about it is definitely not helping.
@Shandyr: Very good arguments. Unfortunately, I believe a big reason for C) is E): people see they're going to become famous of this, so they'll go right ahead and do it, and the media covering in such a huge manner about it is definitely not helping.
Sadly, I have to agree with this. But as the saying goes: one's death is another's bread.
Good Lord, I had hoped this would've been kept out of our forum, but of course it hasn't. Ah well.
In my opinion, the main problem is that the discussion of such events is not based on science. You know, there are in fact several scientific fields that concern themselves with questions such as the effect of media coverage of violence on the population, which mental illnesses may lead to violence and how to identify this early, investigating societal trends that may become problematic (or already have), and try to find solutions to those questions.
As we can nicely see in this thread, people don't care about said science. It's all emotion, old arguments and links to biased websites, and people would rather have their tax money spent on bigger jails and well-armed police than on criminologic, psychiatric or sociological research at their local university. That doesn't solve anything. I find it alarming how many people (not on this forum, mind you) comment on the events with stuff like "Let's pray that things get better" - yeah, why not actually go out and *do* something about it rather than pray? The possibilities are there. It's just a matter of opening your eyes and seeing them.
Mourning this tragic event is alright, but I have the feeling that nothing gets done about it - neither in the US nor anywhere else.
It ties my stomach in absolute knots, and the trouble is, even if anti-gun lobby succeed in managing to get tighter gun controls in place it won't make one iota of difference because there are just too many in circulation.
I read a thought provoking tweet: "A mentally unstable person has easier access to firearms and weapons than to health care. [in the USA] Think of that.” It's effed up is what that is.
The part that is often left out of this is that the lad killed his mother before going to the place where she worked. What would drive a son to murder his own mother before doing what he done? What mental strain was he under to make him think this was a solution? While I am not saying she may have been a bad mother, but what goes on behind closed doors. :-(
@smartroad, the media is a bit chaotic now. Even 24 hours later, there are still rumors flying around about Adam Lanza having some sort of personality disorder. As far as I know, the police are still prohibited from releasing more details at the time of this post.
The part that is often left out of this is that the lad killed his mother before going to the place where she worked. What would drive a son to murder his own mother before doing what he done? What mental strain was he under to make him think this was a solution? While I am not saying she may have been a bad mother, but what goes on behind closed doors. :-(
From what I understood, the person he killed before heading to the school was a girlfriend or something like that, and his mother was at the school. That's why he went down to the school.
All the details are still really hazy and I'm not sure speculating on the details til it's locked down is going to do a whole lot of good. I find it's best to not leap to assumptions.
Comments
Bejing man attacks 22 kids at a elementary school with knife?
http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-man-slashes-22-children-near-china-school-20121214,0,6383015.story
Not having a gun doesn't stop this from happening.
Also, according to your logic, it would be better to ban guns because of evil people using them (at which point they would kill by another means like in the Bejing situation), and that would be worth good people not having them to defend themselves?
So in your ideal world my wife gets killed by a mountain lion? That's rather rude.
I have successfully proven that guns do save people, and have successfully proven that lack of guns does not stop mass murderers from attacking an elementary school (Bejing case).
In order to make the case that guns should be illegal, you would have to disprove at least one of those points, which is now impossible given there is historical precedent for.
In my "ideal world" noone commits any murder. Whether with a gun or anything else. But that's not exactly probable. A decrease in murder thanks to making guns illegal however, is.
If the thousands of people who have been saved by guns would've died instead of the millions who were killed by them, that seems like a fair trade to me. Not ideal, but fair.
"Come here, my friend"... the executioner does his job. "And there it is. A good thing to do."
Another executioner pokes the first executioner on the back. "I'm sorry, but the law is clear. Any person who voluntarily..."
reductio ad absurdum
Interesting cartoon.
Let's worry about these grieving people and the sorry state of these children before you have to worry about a hunk of damn metal.
My prayers are with them all.
From that article
"In 2010, nearly 20 children were killed and 50 wounded in a string of copycat incidents around central China. China has strict gun control laws, so knives are the weapon of choice in violent crimes."
Edit:
In case you didn't notice (I didn't at first) that attack happened this morning, so they haven't released any extended injuries yet.
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/14/15901085-villager-slashes-22-kids-with-knife-at-elementary-school-gates-in-china?lite
Anyway, the point wasn't on that singular attack, as much as it was on the string of violent crimes against children using slashing weapons as the link above discusses that more.
Heres another
http://behindthewall.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/21/14014789-ax-wielding-man-kills-3-kids-wounds-13-in-china?lite
See my edit above for more details on the lack of detailed information.
If my point was to show that regardless of having a gun at your disposal or not, that you would still attack and kill children in a school, then it was an amazing example.
Also, just because only 75% survived doesn't mean more survived. Maybe more were attacked with a knife since you don't have to stop to reload? So while a higher percentage of victims live, you also have more attacked. This is really just an attempt to move away from the original point I was making, which I have made, which is guns don't bust into elementary schools and kill children, people do that, with or without guns.
Strict weapon laws work. Period.
The "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" is the oldest, worst and most idiotic excuse there is. I remember an episode from the show 7th Heaven, where the good Reverend Eric Camden continued the quote with "People with guns kill people". Quite fitting I think.
It would be like comparing the crime rate of a small country town to Chicago.
@Zanian
Edit: If that is true, why does Chicago and Washington DC, with the most strict weapon laws in the united states, have among the highest gun assaults in the country? Because if strict weapon laws worked, period, then they wouldn't be that high, but they are...
Wow this ones weird...
http://winteryknight.wordpress.com/2012/07/14/crime-rates-in-chicago-and-dc-drop-after-gun-control-laws-are-struck-down-2/
So we got less weapon control... and then crime rates... dropped?
That is kind of the opposite of what you said earlier. It is kind of like the criminals knew their victims might be armed now which discouraged crime.
"The 10 states that supply guns at the highest rates have, on average, 1.4 of the 10 laws designed to deter illegal trafficking in place — including laws against "straw purchasers" (people who are legally qualified to buy guns but who do so with the intent to sell the firearms illegally) and gun permit restrictions. The 10 states that supply interstate crime guns at the lowest rates have an average of 8.2 of the 10 laws."
Oh, and to counter your little Chicago/DC argument; the place with the highest crime rate in the world, is the Vatican city. And if I'm not mistaken, they pretty much have no laws regarding the possession of guns.
But if any of you guys can spare money, please donate to help the victims and community affected. Thank you.
http://newtownyouthandfamilyservices.org/
I'm just sad about this whole thing. And I don't think there are any "easy" answers. Gun control, further research into understanding mentally ill people, safer schools... I don't think there is one quick, easy, simple answer.
I just hope people are shocked enough by this senselessness to treat their fellow man better.
I agree with you. I'm not American so I really don't understand why americans feel the NEED to have a weapon in their houses, to "protect" themselves. Don't you have police? Don't you have security sistems in your house? Is killing the person who attacked you the best thing to do?
Of course, even if they make weapons illegal, the murders rate won't reach 0%, and of course someone will find a way to obtain a gun illegaly, but it will surely be more difficult to obtain one. And if someone insane has a violent attack, maybe he would be stopped more easily if he doesn't have a gun near him.
I don't know, I don't have a solution, horrible things like this happen in every country, but it seems that in the USA the rate is higher, is there a reason for that?
I will never understand the obsession with guns, it is a complete anachronism.
That said, I do not think we should just outlaw guns, because then only the outlaws have guns. Instead, we should offer alternatives, and try to affect the public opinion that guns are a necessary evil: they really aren't.
I've brought up maces, security systems, and bulletproof vests. They don't give you the sense of power and invulnerability guns do, which I guess means they'd be more difficult to rely on - but they also don't take lives. In extreme cases, if you're blessed with an exceptionally calm head, you could also just try to talk down the intruder: it works more often than you'd think.
Guns are the easy way out. I'm not the one to advocate easy ways: they're almost always morally questionable and not exactly something to tell to kids to do.
In my opinion, the main problem is that the discussion of such events is not based on science. You know, there are in fact several scientific fields that concern themselves with questions such as the effect of media coverage of violence on the population, which mental illnesses may lead to violence and how to identify this early, investigating societal trends that may become problematic (or already have), and try to find solutions to those questions.
As we can nicely see in this thread, people don't care about said science. It's all emotion, old arguments and links to biased websites, and people would rather have their tax money spent on bigger jails and well-armed police than on criminologic, psychiatric or sociological research at their local university. That doesn't solve anything. I find it alarming how many people (not on this forum, mind you) comment on the events with stuff like "Let's pray that things get better" - yeah, why not actually go out and *do* something about it rather than pray? The possibilities are there. It's just a matter of opening your eyes and seeing them.
Mourning this tragic event is alright, but I have the feeling that nothing gets done about it - neither in the US nor anywhere else.
I read a thought provoking tweet: "A mentally unstable person has easier access to firearms and weapons than to health care. [in the USA] Think of that.” It's effed up is what that is.
I don't think enough people are asking that.
All the details are still really hazy and I'm not sure speculating on the details til it's locked down is going to do a whole lot of good. I find it's best to not leap to assumptions.